2019 Historical Book Club Selections

Great Hurricane: 1938Cherie Burns

January 3 | Cotuit Library | 7 pm

On the night of September 21,, 1938, news on the radio was full of the invasion of Czechoslovakia. There was no mention of any severe weather. By the time oceanfront residents noticed an ominous color in the sky, it was too late to escape. In an age before warning systems and the ubiquity of television, this unprecedented storm caught the Northeast off guard, obliterated coastal communities and killed 700 people.

The Great Hurricane: 1938 is a spellbinding hour-by-hour reconstruction of one of the most destructive and powerful storms ever to hit the United States. With riveting detail, Cherie Burns weaves together countless personal stories of loved ones lost and lives changed forever — from those of the Moore family, washed out to sea on a raft that was formerly their attic floor, to Katharine Hepburn, holed up in her Connecticut mansion, watching her car take to the air like a bit of paper.

Pandemic 1918: Eyewitness Accounts From the Greatest Medical Holocaust in Modern HistoryCatharine Arnold

February 7 | Cotuit Library | 7 pm

In the dying months of World War I, Spanish flu suddenly overwhelmed the world, killing between 50 and 100 million people. German soldiers termed it Blitzkatarrh, British soldiers called it Flanders grippe, but globally the pandemic gained the notorious title of Spanish flu. Nowhere escaped this common enemy: in Britain, 250,000 people died, in the United States it was 750,000, five times our country's total military fatalities in the war. European deaths reached over two million. The numbers are staggering., and yet, at the time, news of the danger was suppressed for fear of impacting wartime morale.

​Even today these figures are shocking to many, the war still hiding this terrifying menace in its shadow. And behind the numbers are human lives, stories of those who suffered and fought in the hospitals and laboratories. Catharine Arnold traces the course of the disease, its origins and progress, across the globe via these remarkable people. Some are well-known to us, like British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, and writers Robert Graves and Vera ​Brittain, but many more are unknown. They were dough boys from the United States, gold miners in South Africa, schoolgirls in Great Britain and many others.

The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great MigrationIsabel Wilkerson

April 18 | Cotuit Library | 7 pm

In this epic, beautifully written masterwork, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Isabel Wilkerson chronicles one of the great untold stories of American history: the decades-long migration of black citizens who fled the South for Northern and Western cities, in search of a better life. From 1915 to 1970, this exodus of almost six million people changed the face of America. Wilkerson compares this epic migration to the migrations of other peoples in history. She interviewed more than a thousand people, and gained access to new data and official records, to write this definitive and dramatic account of how these journeys unfolded, altering our cities, our country and American people.

With stunning historical detail, she tells this story through the lives of three unique individuals: Ida Mae Gladney, who in 1937 left sharecropping and prejudice in Mississippi for Chicago, where she achieved quiet blue-collar success and, in old age, voted for Barack Obama when he ran for an Illinois Senate seat; sharp and quick-tempered George Starling, who in 1945 fled Florida for Harlem, where he endangered his job fighting for civil rights, saw his family fall and finally found peace in God; and Robert Foster, who left Louisiana in 1953 to pursue a medical career and who became Ray Charles’ personal physician as part of a glitteringly successful medical career that allowed him to purchase a grand home and throw exuberant parties.

Wilkerson brilliantly captures everything from their first treacherous cross-country trips by car and train to their new lives in colonies that grew into ghettos. She shows how they changed their cities with Southern food, faith and culture and improved them with discipline, drive and hard work. Both a riveting microcosm and a major assessment, ​The Warmth of Other Suns is a bold, remarkable and riveting work, a superb account of an “unrecognized immigration” within our own land.

Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo"Zora Neale Hurston

May 2 | Cotuit Library | 7 pm

Written by the author of Their Eyes Were Watching God,with a foreword from Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alice Walker, Barracoon brilliantly illuminates the horror and injustices of slavery in its telling of the true story of one of the last-known survivors of the Atlantic slave trade: Cudjo Lewis, abducted from Africa on the last "Black Cargo" ship to arrive in the United States.

In 1927, Zora Neale Hurston went to Plateau, Alabama, an African-centric community three miles from Mobile, to interview the 86-year-old Cudjo. Of the millions of men, women and children transported from Africa to America as slaves, Cudjo was then the only person alive to give a firsthand account of the raid that led to his capture and bondage 50 years after the Atlantic slave trade had been outlawed in the United States.

In 1931, Hurston returned to Plateau, which had been founded by Cudjo and other former slaves from his ship. Spending more than three months there, she talked in depth with him about the details of his life. During those weeks, the young writer and the elderly formerly enslaved man ate peaches and watermelon that grew in the backyard and talked about Cudjo’s past, including memories of his childhood in Africa, the horrors of being captured and held in a barracoon for selection by American slavers, the harrowing experience of the Middle Passage packed with more than 100 other souls aboard the Clotilda, and the years he spent in slavery until the end of the Civil War. Last year, Barracoon was named Amazon’s Best History Book, Time magazine’s Best Nonfiction Book of the Year and New York Public Library’s Best Book of 2018, among many other honors.

The Underground Railroad: A NovelColson Whitehead

June 6 | Cotuit Library | 7 pm

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, this No.1 New York Times bestseller from Colson Whitehead is a magnificent tour de force, chronicling a young slave's adventures as she makes a desperate bid for freedom in the antebellum South.

Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. Life is hell for all the slaves, but especially difficult for Cora, who’s an outcast even among her fellow Africans. When Caesar, a recent arrival from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad, they decide to take a terrifying risk and escape. Matters do not go as planned (Cora kills a young white boy who tries to capture her), and though they manage to find a station and head north, they are hunted by a relentless slave catcher, close on their heels.

In Whitehead’s ingenious conception, the Underground Railroad is no mere metaphor — engineers and conductors operate a secret network of tracks and tunnels beneath the Southern soil. Cora and Caesar’s first stop is South Carolina, in a city that initially seems like a haven. But the city’s placid surface masks an insidious scheme designed for its black denizens. Repeatedly, Cora is forced to flee, embarking on a harrowing state-by-state flight seeking true freedom. Like the protagonist of Gulliver’s Travels, Cora encounters different worlds at each stage of her journey — hers is an odyssey through time as well as space.

When Books Went to War: The Stories That Helped Us Win World War IIMolly Guptill Manning

July 11 | Cotuit Library | 7 pm

When America entered World War II in 1941, we faced an enemy that had banned and burned 100 million books. Outraged librarians launched a campaign to send free books to American troops and gathered 20 million hardcover donations. In 1943, the War Department and the publishing industry stepped in with an extraordinary program: 120 million small, lightweight paperbacks for troops to carry in their pockets and rucksacks in every theater of war. These Armed Services Editions were beloved by the troops and are still fondly remembered today. Soldiers read them while waiting to land at Normandy, in hellish trenches in the midst of battles in the Pacific, in field hospitals and on long bombing flights. They helped rescue The Great Gatsby from obscurity and made Betty Smith, author of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, into a national icon. Engaging and enlightening, When Books Went to War is the inspiring story of the Armed Services Editions, and a treasure for history buffs and book-lovers alike.

The Immortal Irishman: The Irish Revolutionary Who Became an American HeroTimothy Egan

August 1 | Cotuit Library | 7 pm

The Irish-American story, with all its twists and triumphs, is told through the improbable life of one man. A dashing young orator during the Great Famine of the 1840s, in which a million of his Irish countrymen died, Thomas Francis Meagher led a failed uprising against British rule, for which he was banished to a Tasmanian prison colony. He escaped and six months later was heralded in the streets of New York -- the revolutionary hero, back from the dead..

​At the dawn of the great Irish immigration to America,. Meagher's rebirth in America included his leading the newly formed Irish Brigade from New York in many of the fiercest battles of the Civil War, including Bull Run, Antietam and Fredericksburg. Twice shot from his horse while leading charges and left for dead in the Virginia mud, Meagher's dream was that Irish-American troops, seasoned by war, would return to Ireland and liberate their homeland from British rule. The hero's last chapter, as territorial governor of Montana, was a romantic quest for a true home in the far frontier. His death has long been a mystery to which Egan brings haunting, colorful new evidence.

Above and Beyond: John F. Kennedy and America's Most Dangerous Cold War Spy MissionCasey Sherman and Michael Tougias

September 5 | Cotuit Library | 7 pm

From the authors of The Finest Hours comes the riveting, deeply human story of President John F. Kennedy and two U-2 pilots, Rudy Anderson and Chuck Maultsby, who risked their lives to save America during the Cuban Missile Crisis. During an infamous 13-day stretch in October 1962, America faced the prospect of imminent nuclear war with the Soviet Union. According to Sherman and Tougias, two things saved humanity: Kennedy's strategic wisdom and the U-2 aerial spy program.

On October 27, 1962, Kennedy, strained from back pain, sleeplessness and days of impossible tension, was briefed about a missing spy plane. Its pilot, Chuck Maultsby, was on a surveillance mission over the North Pole, but had become disoriented and steered his plane into Soviet airspace. If detected, its presence there could be considered an act of war. As the president and his advisers wrestled with this information, more bad news came: another U-2 had gone missing, this one belonging to Rudy Anderson, whose mission was to photograph missile sites over Cuba. For Kennedy, any wrong move could turn the Cold War nuclear. Above and Beyond is a deeply researched, gripping account of the lives of these three men, war heroes all, who were brought together during a day that could have changed history.

The Johnstown FloodDavid McCullough

October 3 | Cotuit Library | 7 pm

At the end of the 19th century, Johnstown, Pennsylvania, was a booming coal-and-steel town filled with hardworking families striving for a piece of the nation’s burgeoning industrial prosperity. In the mountains above Johnstown, an old earth dam had been hastily rebuilt to create a lake for an exclusive summer resort patronized by the tycoons of that same industrial prosperity, among them Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick, and Andrew Mellon. Despite repeated warnings of possible danger, nothing was done about the dam. Then came May 31, 1889, when the dam burst, sending a wall of water thundering down the mountain, smashing through Johnstown and killing more than 2,000 people. It was a tragedy that became a national scandal.

​Graced by David McCullough’s remarkable gift for writing richly textured, sympathetic social history, The Johnstown Flood is an absorbing, classic portrait of life in 19th-century America, of overweening confidence, of energy and of tragedy. It also offers a powerful historical lesson for our century and all times: the danger of assuming that because people are in positions of responsibility they are necessarily behaving responsibly.

The Mayflower: The Families, the Voyage and the Founding of AmericaRebecca Fraser

November 7 | Cotuit Library | 7 pm

​The voyage of the Mayflower and the founding of Plymouth Colony is one of the seminal events in world history. But the poorly equipped group of English Puritans who ventured across the Atlantic in the early autumn of 1620 had no sense they would pass into legend. They had 80 casks of butter and two dogs, but no cattle for milk, meat or ploughing. They were ill-prepared for the brutal journey and the new land that few of them could comprehend. But the Mayflower story did not end with these Pilgrims’ arrival on the coast of New England or their first uncertain years as settlers. Rebecca Fraser traces two generations of one ordinary family and their extraordinary response to the challenges of life in America.

Edward Winslow, an apprentice printer, fled England and then Holland for a life of religious freedom and opportunity. Despite the intense physical trials of settlement, he found America exotic, enticing and endlessly interesting. He built a home and a family, and his remarkable friendship with King Massassoit, Chief of the Wampanoags, is part of the legend of Thanksgiving. Yet, 50 years later, Edward’s son Josiah was commanding the New England militias against Massassoit’s son in King Philip’s War.​The Mayflower​is an intensely human portrait of the Winslow family, written with the pace of an epic. Rebecca Fraser details domestic life in the 17th century, the histories of brave and vocal Puritan women, and the contradictions between generations as fathers and sons made their painful decisions

The Secret Token: Myth, Obsession and the Search for the Lost Colony of RoanokeAndrew Lawler

December 5 | Cotuit Library | 7 pm

​A sweeping account of America's oldest unsolved mystery, the people racing to unearth its answer, and the sobering truths about race, gender, and immigration exposed by the Lost Colony of Roanoke

In 1587, 115 men, women, and children arrived at Roanoke Island on the coast of North Carolina. Chartered by Queen Elizabeth I, their colony was to establish England's first foothold in the New World. But when the colony's leader, John White, returned to Roanoke from a resupply mission, his settlers were nowhere to be found. They left behind only a single clue — a "secret token" carved into a tree. Neither White nor any other European laid eyes on the colonists again.

What happened to the Lost Colony of Roanoke? For 400 years that question has consumed historians and amateur sleuths, leading only to dead ends and hoaxes. But after a chance encounter with a British archaeologist, journalist Andrew Lawler discovered that solid answers to the mystery were within reach. He set out to unravel the enigma of the lost settlers, accompanying competing researchers, each hoping to be the first to solve its riddle. In the course of his journey, Lawler encounters a host of characters obsessed with the colonists and their fate, and he determines why the Lost Colony continues to haunt our national consciousness.

Thrilling and absorbing, The Secret Tokenoffers a new understanding not just of the first English settlement in the New World but of how its disappearance continues to define and divide America.